The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly. […]

By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton. […]

So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.

If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.

Short version: they are rich, spoiled people who feel entitled to govern. When they don’t get their way, they rage.

Workout: 6.2 mile (10 km) walk in 1:30; nice morning for it. There were lots of hills (same course as Saturday). That gives me 115 miles for August. I am on the mend!

Knee: perfect; stretched and did hip hikes afterward.

Shoulder: some pain last night but better; I slept well.

I had PT today: I had a greater range of motion and used the arm bike and therabands (red). I’ll have one more appointment this week; I’ll use the arm bike tomorrow. My arms feel like butter…just way too flabby and soft.

I went to my physical therapy session at IPMR. They have a modest sized parking lot and there wasn’t a place to park when I got there; finally a place opened up 10 minutes after I arrived. But there were relatively few people in the therapy place.

It was one of those “pay to listen to high achievers motivate you” type seminars. They had decided that they didn’t want to use the parking decks but instead use the parking lot for the physical therapy patients…those with damaged legs, backs necks, etc.

Assholes. Losers. They remind me of the father character in Little Miss Sunshine.

PoliticsIn spite of what the White House says, many liberal economists were crying out for a much larger stimulus from the beginning, even if they admitted that the stimulus that was passed was better than no stimulus at all.

Yes, I disagree with the administration over this. But this is a matter of arguing on how to pull the car out of the ditch; our political opponents want to solve the problem by making the ditch bigger and filling it with quicksand.

I have the questionable distinction of appearing on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC program several times a week, arguing with people whose positions under normal circumstances would get no serious attention, and defending policies I would have thought so clearly and obviously defensible they should need no justification. But we are living through strange times. The economy is so bad that the social fabric is coming undone, and what used to be merely weird economic theories have become debatable public policies.

Tonight it was Harvard Professor Robert Barro, who opined in today’s Wall Street Journal that America’s high rate of long-term unemployment is the consequence rather than the cause of today’s extended unemployment insurance benefits.

In theory, Barro is correct. If people who lose their jobs receive generous unemployment benefits they might stay unemployed longer than if they got nothing. But that’s hardly a reason to jettison unemployment benefits or turn our backs on millions of Americans who through no fault of their own remain jobless in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Yet moral hazard lurks in every conservative brain. It’s also true that if we got rid of lifeguards and let more swimmers drown, fewer people would venture into the water. And if we got rid of fire departments and more houses burnt to the ground, fewer people would use stoves. A civil society is not based on the principle of tough love.

I’ll add to this: there are intellectually intelligent Republicans, but they are just plain misguided. Yes, tough love might work when one is talking about ADVANCEMENT but not when talking about the basics…at least NOT with everyone. Sure, there is always that wayward kid that needs to be pushed out of the nest to learn to grow up. And yes, there are good for nothing slackers; there are some in my own family. They disgust me. But in such times of economic hardship, it isn’t as if there are jobs just sitting around to be had; there are well intentioned, hard working people who are suffering.

A majority of Republicans believe that President Barack Obama “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world,” according to a survey released on Monday.

That figure, buried at the very end of a newly released Newsweek public opinion poll, reflects the extent to which a shocking bit of smear and misinformation has managed to become nearly commonplace within the GOP tent.

The Newsweek findings add more kindling to the already-heated debate raging around the persistent rumors that Obama is a closeted Muslim (he’s not). In an illustration of just how deeply news outlets have been drawn to the topic, the magazine devoted seven of its 24 questions to Muslim-themed topics, producing, in the process, a number of telling and newsworthy numbers.

Fifty-nine percent of Republicans, for instance, said they believed the president favored “the interests of Muslims over other groups of Americans,” while only 34 percent of said he had been “generally even handed” in his approach. In contrast, nine percent of Democrats said Obama favored “the interests of Muslims over other groups of Americans” while 82 percent of Democrats said he had been even-handed.

On a more uplifting front, 16 percent of all respondents said they had a very favorable view of Muslims while 45 percent said they had a “mostly favorable” view — the highest and second highest totals recorded for those answers in the survey’s history, respectively.

Former Education Commissioner Bret Schundler admitted Monday he made the crucial error that cost New Jersey up to $400 million federal education funds, saying he inadvertently removed crucial data from the state’s application.

However, Schundler, who was fired from his post last Friday, continued to maintained he did not lie to Gov. Chris Christie when describing what happened during the state’s Race to the Top presentation to judges in Washington, D.C., earlier this month

In a telephone interview with The Star-Ledger, Schundler said he’s learned the Education Department has found a draft of the Race to the Top application with edits, in his handwriting, that remove the data federal officials requested.

Schundler, however, said he does not remember deleting the data, has not seen the document and declined to elaborate on how he learned it even exists.

“I was responsible,” he said. “What can I say? … I screwed up.”

A spokesman for the Department of Education referred calls to the governor’s press office, which declined to comment.

The series of events last week roiled the state’s education community and prompted both houses of the Democrat-controlled legislature to call for hearings. It also led to the first high-profile departure from the Christie administration.

Schundler said that as late as Friday, he was still unsure about the source of the error, which Christie, during a press conference on Wednesday, attributed to a mid-level staffer. The governor also blamed Washington bureaucrats who he said would not let the state correct the error during an in-person presentation in Washington, D.C. on June 1.

But on Thursday, a video released by the U.S. Department of Education contradicted Christie’s claims and showed the state did not try to correct the error.

“Isn’t it funny too how often people were famous in a past life. They were always Cleopatra or Alexander the Great and died spectacularly, never John who died of bubonic plague, or Mary who died in child birth.” – palefury

Or they were never a caveman who got eaten or died of an infected tooth.

About Blueollie

To keep track of my sports activities. I rarely train for anything anymore; mostly I just do workouts of the following types: running, walking, weight lifting and swimming. My best ultra accomplishment was walking 101 miles in 24 hours in 2004. These days, I walk a marathon every once in a while (5:30 to 7 hours) There was a time when I could run a sub 40 minute 10K (did that once), but that was another lifetime ago; these a days 2427-2825 25:45-27:00 minutes for a 5K would be more like it. I also have an off and on interest in yoga and in weight training. My lifetime PB in the bench is 310; currently I do sets of 4 with 180.

From time to time, I post what I am thinking about mathematically

I often post links to science articles, especially articles about cosmology and evolution.

I am very sympathetic to the “new atheist” movement, though some might consider me to be an agnostic. I reject any notion of a deity that interferes with physical events, but remain agnostic to the idea that there might be something “grand and wonderful” (Dawkins’ phrase) outside of our current spacetime continuum.

I am a liberal Democrat who thinks that the current social atmosphere is tilted way too far toward the interests of big business, and I reject the idea that a “free market” cures all ills, though pure socialism doesn’t work either. I am also a believer in the freedom of speech, including speech that I might not like. Also, I’ve been involved (to a moderate degree) with political campaigns, ranging from City Council races up to Presidential races.

I like to post photos of trips and vacations.

I sometimes blog about boxing matches and baseball, football and basketball games.

I like women in spandex. :)

Yes, I’ve removed my President Obama stuff. I still like him and I think that he has done a fine job and is continuing to do so. But that campaign is over and has been some time ago. For 2016, I am backing Secretary Clinton.